CASE STUDY

Concluding Thoughts on the QA Financial Forum

Posted by Maya Ber Lerner April 17, 2017

I just got back from the QA Financial Forum in London. [Read my previous blog post on the QA Financial forum here.] It's the second time that this event has taken place in London, and this time it was even more thought-provoking for me than the first one. It's a very personal event—a busy day with talk after talk after talk—and it feels that everyone is there to learn and contribute, and be part of a community. I knew quite a few of the participants from last year, and it gave me an opportunity to witness the progress and the shifting priorities and mind sets.

I see change from last year—DevOps and automation seem to have become more important to everyone, and were the main topic of discussion. The human factor was a major concern: how do we structure teams so that Dev cares about Ops and vice versa? How important is it for cross functional teams to be collocated? How do you avoid hurting your test engineers' career path, when roles within cross functional teams begin to merge? Listening to what everyone had to say about it, it seems that the only way to solve this is by being human. We do this by trying to bring teams closer together as much as possible, communicating clearly and often, helping people continuously learn and acquire new skills, handling objection fearlessly, and being crystal clear about the goals of the organization.

Henk Kolk from ING gave a great talk, and despite his disclaimer that one size doesn't fit all, I think the principals of ING's impressive gradual adoption of DevOps in the past 5 years can be practical and useful for everyone: cross functional teams that span Biz, Ops, Dev and Infrastructure; a shift to immutable infrastructure; version controlling EVERYTHING…

Michael Zielier's talk, explaining how HSBC is adopting continuous testing, was engaging and candid. The key expectations that he described from tools really resonated with me. A tool for HSBC has to be modular, collaborative, centralized, integrative, reduce maintenance effort, and look to the future with regards to infrastructure, virtualization, and new technologies. He also talked about a topic that was mentioned many times during the day: a risk-based approach to automation. Although most things can be automated, not everything should. Deciding what needs to be automated and tested and what doesn't is becoming more important as automation evolves. To me, this indicates a growing understanding of automation: that automation is not necessarily doing the same things that you did manually only without a human involved, but is rather a chance to re-engineer your process and make it better.

This connected perfectly to Shalini Chaudhari's presentation, covering Accenture's research on testing trends and technologies. Her talk about the challenge of testing artificial intelligence, and the potential of using artificial intelligence to test (and decide what to test!), tackled a completely different aspect of testing and really made me think.

I liked Nicky Watson’s effort to make the testing organization a DevOps leader at Credit Suisse. For me, it makes so much sense that test professionals should be in the "DevOps driver's seat," as she phrased, and not dragging behind developers and ops people.

One quote that got stuck in my head was from Rick Allen of Zurich Insurance Company explaining how difficult it is to create a standard DevOps practice across teams and silos: “Everyone wants to do it their way and get ‘the sys admin password of DevOps.’" This is true and challenging. I look forward to hearing about their next steps, next year in London.